Tag Archives: Kansas City

Coming back to work on transcriptions for LaBudde after having worked on transcriptions from interviews I had conducted for the LatinxKC project has been a little bit of an adjustment. It is interesting looking at the interviews now from the perspective of having finished the oral history class as opposed to my thoughts while I was taking the class. I remember the frustration of trying to hear and sort out many voices as opposed to just one voice, but I have now come to see the place for different approaches. Having read about the therapeutic benefits of a group interview, I can see why someone might choose the more informal round table method as a way to preserve history. I can also see the benefits of a monologue and removing some of the external sources of intimidation which might threaten to question a person’s memory. One of the primary take aways I had from the oral history course was the importance of memory and finding how events felt and were remember for individuals and communities. I have noticed that one benefit of a relaxed group is that the group self corrects some of the flows in memory in such a way that it allows for the speaker to preserve their memory of the event in a less threatened way. Although the little group may correct each other on the dates, the shared community of the group, particularly in the lesbian round table interview I’m working with, seems to be very conscious and sensitive towards the feelings and memories of the other group members. Yet, I have also found that self correction occures for individuals without the group, such as in the monologue I have transcribed. The difference is that a group self correcting often becomes chaotic and the very corrections the group wishes to impose can be lost within the jumble of words, laughter, and jesting which are usual benefits of such groups. The individual on the other hand, when self correcting, is limited to their own conflicting recollection, and although more understandable, the corrections can still result in relatively jumbled and uncertain conclusions. What the monologue style confession does give is a free flow of what the narrator finds important. I say confession, because with the existence of the microphone, the narrator is still very aware that they are speaking to other people and wants to please those listeners. They must do so, however, without those listeners being there to give supportive listening cues or to directly participate in the guiding of the conversation. So, in some ways, the monologue is the most authentic confession of the person’s memories and values of what was important. But in other ways, the lack of a living person and the smile or nod of their head, can leave narrators monologueing to expectations which are not even there.

The group interview, in contrast, would appear to have the greatest level of interruptions, tangents, and outright questioning of the narrator’s memory. Yet, the comfort of having friends and a shared sense of support and community in the group interview of the lesbian round table allowed the speakers to question each other without fear. Thus, despite the frequent outbursts of laughter and side comments, the group is comfortable and most members are able to reflect on the events and what it felt like to them.

On a more critical note, I do not believe I would prefer to conduct either of the interview forms I’ve been transcribing. The monologue, while therapeutic and potentially more comfortable for the speaker, holds potential pitfalls in the assumption that the narrator will no longer be nervous with the living person being removed and the cold inanimate judgment of the tape recorder remaining. Yet, if I had gotten an interview with the narrator (which was the case of the monologue) then a monologue might allow the narrator to speak and contradict me in a safer nonconfrontational format. This is a worthy benefit, especially if there were conflicting memories and perspectives of events and places between the interview and the monologue’s account.

I also do no believe I’d want to do the group interview either, but for different reasons. Although the group interview could be more comfortable and allow for womens voices to be presented in a more natural and freeing way, the difficulty of hearing such voices can be a problem. Although the group interview provides a great sense of the group’s relationships and community, as well as still effectively conveying key points if the narrators’ views, it can also lose the particular views and memories of some of the individual members. The group reflection allows for sparked memories to be added to the narrative and a weaving of stories and fragments into a group sense of shared experience. The individual strands and story treads which contribute to the overall weave are visible, but can be lost in the blending of so many stories and threads. I have noticed that some of the quieter narrators in the group interview tend to be overtalked and some individuals with differing perspectives can be ganged up on by more vocal or forceful speakers. Some of the softer spoken narrators can be lost in the midst of background jesting or bombastic laughter. While creating a great sense of the group and allowing a format which sparks recollections, reflections, and additional details to stories, the different individual perspectives and memory of events can be lost in a group interview. Most of this is because the additional details and freedom to jump in create overtalking. More importantly, the round table group interview was so comfortable that it allowed some narrators to jump in late in the recording, or suddenly appear on record when they had silently been participating the whole time. The increase of influencing factors and visual cues present in the round table makes an audio recording confusing to listen to. Without a visual recording included with the audio it is, at times, nearly impossible to know who and what is being talked to or about. Individual interviews with each person would have allowed for much deeper and complete interviews in many ways, esoecially for the more timid speakers. Again, the group interview does provides a sense of the groups memory and also allows for contributions to each other stories by the narrators in ways which cannot be discounted. Yet, without individual interviews, I can’t help but wonder if the stories told by the group are those the quieter members would have told on their own, or if the stronger members of the group, with the best of intentions or without even knowing it, guided the group into a memory distinctly imprinted with their leadership.

My last post I talked about how I am almost finished with entering the entire collection into the museum’s collections management software. I can safely say that next week that will finally be finished. It is a bit relieving finally getting this task accomplished. When I first came to the American Royal almost two years ago, I had no idea the amount of work that was needed. After my first couple of weeks I quickly knew that I could not complete the task within the ten weeks I was initially hired for. I was working off a Microsoft Access database that was created in 2003 and was horribly outdated and was missing over 400 entries. I decided the only way to accomplish this task thoroughly was to go through each file individually and to ignore the Access database. Now I have entered just over 500 artifacts and when I am finished it should be closer to 525.

When I am finished with this I will start writing the action plan and organizing the collections storage areas available to me now. The end of the semester is quickly approaching, but everything is finally coming together.

Hello, my name is Philip Bland and I am the Collections Intern at the American Royal Association. Most people know the American Royal for its barbecue contest, livestock shows, or horse shows and few know that the American Royal has its own museum. For the past year and a half I have been working under the Director of Education, Kristie Larson, to help digitize the museum’s collection catalog and implement some best practices in collection storage. This semester though, we are pivoting from addressing current needs to looking towards the future.

Last October, the American Royal Association announced the relocation of its events and offices to a brand new facility located in Kansas City, Kansas. With it, the American Royal plans to incorporate an education center in addition to its current museum. With the prospect of a brand new museum at a new location, one of the first questions posed to me was how do we move the collection? This semester I will be working on developing an action plan for how to move/store the collection to the new museum. Also, I will provide a list of collection storage needs and options for the new museum. While working on this plan I will be reaching out to other museum professionals in the area that have also recently gone through moves or facility upgrades that required their collection to be moved and/or stored.

I am excited to take on a project that will expand my knowledge of collection management and also provides an opportunity to network with other museum professionals in the Kansas City area. I hope to pass on some of the knowledge to you as well throughout the process.

Today I began two transcriptions which, though similar in focus, couldn’t have resulted in more diverse work experiences. One was an individual monologue about the gay scene in Kansas City since the 1960s. The other was a round table discussions of the different experiences of a group of lesbians in Kansas City. While the monologue flowed fairly smoothly and demanded more focus on grammatical form, due to the narrators use of pauses and vocal delivery, the round table require more nuanced attention. With frequent interruptions, laughter, and joking among the narrators as they seamlessly flowed off of and into each others conversations, I found myself needing to stop and learn the narrator’s unique voices. While the first project demanded I try to understand the rhythm and meaning of the narrator’s delivery (to know what should be a period or comma), the other demanded I listen for distinct voice markers.

In both cases I needed to hear the individual quality of the narrator’s voice, but in different ways. I couldn’t simply type out what I heard. In the monologue, without first hearing the narrators rhythm and broader topic, I could very easily structure the statements incorrectly. In the round table interview, the general lack of names being given before speaking and the boisterous free-flow of conversation, left me confused without better context. Though both required topical context, the round table drove me to become familiar with the voices themselves. In both transcriptions I needed to start orienting myself a few minutes into the recording, not at the beginning. This was a new experience compared to those stories I had heard since childhood which start at, you guessed it, the beginning. I needed to not only hear the rural style to “Pat’s” Midwestern voice as opposed to the higher pitched, New Jersey fast pace of Giselle’s voice; but I also needed to hear the more nuanced differences between the rich tones of Sue’s Davenport voice and Bev’s Kansas City voice.

The longer I listened, over and over, I started to hear the vocal tones of different laughs and the patterns of different speakers. I began to become familiar with their voices, to know them. I began to really hear them. Sometimes foreign to the historical voices of monographs and journal essays, the recordings brought be into a more challenging and more personal type of history. It was challenging, disorienting, and a little unsettling. But it was also beautiful. The struggle to discover the voices of the historical agents was present, just like in other forms of research, but in new ways. It wasn’t enough to hear the narrator’s voice, to get their words, but I had to discern their voice for its distinct qualities. It wasn’t enough to know the words and actions of the historical agent, but what makes them different from other historical agents. Today was a wonderful example of literally learning to hear the voices of those in the past who I had never heard before, and I can’t wait to hear what they will say next.

I finally made it over the the Steamboat Arabia Museum to look for a chloroform bottle to at least get some good photos of our own for the Civil War medicine exhibit at Wornall. The bottles at Clendening Medical Library were nice, but I could not positively date them to the Civil War. They looked more 1872 than 1860s to me Esoteric, I know, but its my job. I knew I had seen a collection of medicine bottles at the SAM and their provenance was flawless.

When I finally saw the collection again this week, I learned a few things. First, the labels on many of the bottles were paper and were destroyed by the mud and water. We have no earthly idea what some of those bottles contain. At one point, the SAM sent some sample bottles to a lab for testing. The lab called back to confirm the order and had a conversation that went something like, “Yeah, some of the medicines that we do know that were widely used in this period of history contained opium and if we find opium in this stuff we have to notify the DEA and you guys are going to have to spend some money to keep it secured and inaccessible from the public.” Umm…okay box it up and send it back. Click…brrrrr.

Second thing learned was, they do not know whats in the bottles and they do not want to know what is in the bottles. So, no chloroform bottle yet, however, I did meet a man who offered to loan us a Civil War saber and bayonet. Unfortunately, those items accounted for only about 2-4% of Civil War battle wounds.

Unfortunately, my work here at UMKC History Makers is at its end. I have enjoyed writing these blogs and I hope anyone that read them found some of that joy too. I hope we meet this way again in the future. In the meantime, the the search for artifacts and archives continues, the dream lives on, and I have many miles to go before I rest.

Every research subject has its own peculiar problems. Much of my previous research focuses on mental health issues in the nineteenth century America, and the records sometimes fall under the jurisdiction of federal health care privacy laws. Those laws impose certain restrictions on personally identifiable healthcare information, which in turn affects what types of sources are open to the public and what sources require special permissions. Our HistoryMakers internship project’s peculiar problem was my architectural literacy – as in, I didn’t have any!

Graduate students tend to have fairly solid vocabularies, but it didn’t take me long to realize that I did not know how to describe, classify, and write about buildings. Sure, I knew about roofs, floors, and walls, and could even differentiate between brick and stone. What I could not do was talk about architecture’s finer points – cornices, entablatures, hip-roofs, muntins, and fenestrations were all a mystery to me. Clearly, I needed to keep my dictionary handy!

A Chicago School Skyscraper diagram from the excellent Chicago Textures architecture blog

The best part about learning to describe architectural flourishes in technical terms was that my everyday life got much more interesting. Kansas City is full of complex, compelling, and diverse architecture. With my newfound lingo, I was able to read the City’s buildings in new ways, noting the architectural styles and thinking about their historical and visual context. Instead of seeing a building with a decorative front, I noticed its a structure with a façade; whereas before I saw a ledge-thingy, I now know that the decorative elements visually dividing the wall from rooftop are an entablature. Both façade and entablature came up a lot during my research: they’re common elements in Chicago-school neoclassical high rise design, a common style in downtown Kansas City.

Like a foreign language, learning a new professional lexicon is time-consuming. But my novice architectural vocabulary has expanded my world view by unlocking new and exciting elements in my everyday life. Buildings that I had passed without noticing now speak to me. Or, to put it another way, through my newfound architectural vocabulary I could hear the buildings for the first time.

For our internship, Natalie and I were tasked to research local historic buildings and write about them. The individual entries are going to aggregated and published in the revised version of A Place in Time, a guide to historic buildings in Kansas City. Beyond the research, which I’ve documentedin previous posts, there’s the difficult task of writing the entries. This post will walk through the entry writing process, following my decision making process for striking a balance between historical information and architectural analysis.

Most writers — not just HistoryMakers — should start out by considering their audience. For the revised A Place in Time, our assumed audience is the general public. That phrase sounds good, but what does it mean? What information should we assume our reader will already know? We certainly don’t want to come off as condescending, but at the same time we don’t want to alienate readers by assuming that they are familiar with local history or architectural terms. So, writing for a general audience, I tried to excise all jargon from my entries, sometimes using less precise words; after all, it’s much more important to convey the appropriate idea than it is to show off a huge vocabulary. We also provided brief introductions and historical background when needed.

Bobby Greenlease

Finally, as a book on the history of architecture, we had to decide how to split up each entry between historical information and architectural analysis. Each entry was like a cocktail, and we had to find a reasonable blend of historical and architectural information for each entry. While I generally tried to split the information evenly, the decision varied for each site. Some buildings, like Notre Dame de Sion’s Midtown campus, were connected to compelling local stories like the Greenlease Kidnapping. Naturally, that story plays a part in the Sion entry. Other buildings were much more architecturally interesting, or maybe lacked a notable historical anecdote. In those cases, the entry focused on architectural description.

Ultimately, our authorial choices reflected the needs of our presumed audience and the strengths of each particular site. Or, at least, that’s the hope!

Every now and then, you’re going to hit a research wall. All HistoryMakers have experienced it. And now that I think about it, the wall metaphor is not exactly a great one. It’s really more like a research vacuum. You’ll know the question that you want to ask, and perhaps you can even imagine the type of sources that you’d like to find. But like oxygen in space, the sources aren’t there, and don’t seem likely to present themselves anytime soon.

At times like these, even the most experienced researchers reach out to their dear friends, the archivist. Archives are wonderful places – most that I’ve visited bubble over with resources – but they are often a bit like a junk-yard. No, you’re not likely to find a spare side-mirror for a 2003 Corolla at an archive, and they usually don’t have large dogs guarding the documents. But what you are going to need, at either a junkyard or the National archives, is help finding the right item.

My own particular research vacuum was the White Oak School, a modest country school that operated in rural Jackson County from the late nineteenth century until the middle 1960s, when it was annexed into the Independence School District. My largest research trouble was that the nature of small school and its county locale meant that there was literally no information about the school at the Missouri Valley Archives. Dr. Wolf, the Kansas City Historic Preservation Officer and erstwhile internship, suggested that I contact David Jackson at the Jackson County Historical Society.

The Old Jackson County Courthouse

Located in the historic (and recently renovated) Old Jackson County Courthouse, the Historical society had a wealth of information about the White Oak School. There were some primary source accounts of the school’s creation that David Jackson found in a well-worn county history. The historical society even had a vertical file dedicated to Jackson county schools, which contained several yellowing newspaper articles from 1960s that covered the White Oak School’s annexation and eventual closure. David even helped me find some additional information on Little Blue, a rural Jackson County community that had previously proved difficult to locate. Without David Jackson’s knowledgeable and capable assistance, I would still be stuck in that research vacuum.

So, get to know your local archivist — they are your best friend in the archive.

I would not be in my internship position at the Wornall House without my solid academic background. For years, I have worked hard in school, earned good grades, and received a few honors and accolades from academia. My knowledge of historiography, American History, and specifically Missouri history, has paid off in getting me into this choice internship at Wornall House. I have loved every minute of it. Now that I am in this position and have accomplished a few things, I look back and recount what it took, beyond this background knowledge and education, to get things done thus far.

The first thing I was able to do was “hook up” the Wornall House with Dr. Matthew Osborn at UMKC for a planned “Whiskey as Medicine” cocktail party/fundraising event in the fall. At an early meeting I learned of the planned party and suggested that Dr. Osborn would be an excellent guest speaker at the event. Dr. Osborn has specialized knowledge in the area of the consumption of alcohol and drugs in early America and teaches a popular course at UMKC called “Getting High in America.” My connections at UMKC through the History Department made that possibility a reality. I look forward to hearing Dr. Osborn’s short speech about the topic of “Whiskey as Medicine” while enjoying shot of whiskey at a cocktail party in the fall.

My second accomplishment was to connect the professional photography work of Bethany Wears to the project. Bethany took the photos I have used in these blog entries about Wornall House and the more formal blog entries I am posting at the Kansas City Public Library’s Civil War on the Western Border website. Bethany’s photos inspired me. They really did. The muse visited when I wrote the piece on the .44 lead ball for the library and I am proud of that work and most fortunate to get the opportunity to network with Jason Roe PhD at the library. He is an editor with the mostest! The thing is, Bethany does not work cheap. She is a full-blown professional and charges around $175 an hour for her work. So far, I have been able to get her work donated to the museum. Will I be able to get Bethany to donate more of her time and work? Stay tuned!

The six planned blog entries at the KCPL website coincide with the planned exhibit at the Wornall House. Those blogs and my encyclopedia entries there are my best “published” work. Each of those pieces are like notches on my pistol grips. I’m a sure shot Border War history writer and those articles and blog entries are a record to prove it. I look forward to adding more notches over the summer.

One other accomplishment, and I’m still holding my breath on this one, is in obtaining artifacts for the exhibit. The original theme of the project was Civil War Medicine. As I have mentioned in previous blogs, the Wornall House does not own any artifacts that can be directly related to Civil War medicine. Through my own creativity, I managed to connect the .44 caliber lead ball to medicine, but other than the bullet, the museum owns nothing medically related. We have to come up with that stuff on our own. Through my network of personal acquaintances at our restaurant, The Bean Counter Cafe’, I have an inside track with the folks that own the privately owned Steamboat Arabia Museum (SAM). The SAM has quite possibly the largest collection of antebellum artifacts in the world. What they have medically related and what they may loan us for the exhibit remains to be seen. It is a project in the works that may work out well and I owe that to my network–and the fine food and congenial atmosphere of our business.

I had a fair part in choosing the topics for the upcoming Wornall House exhibit and and I am taking on the responsibilities of researching and writing for the project beyond the terms of my internship. I will be working over the summer because it so many ways the planned exhibit has become my baby. With Anna Marie Tutera accepting a new position at the Kansas City Museum the Directors job at Wornall/Majors will be open. I plan on throwing my hat in the ring if I get even half a chance to do so. I know it is long shot, but if I were to get that gig, I would credit it to my personal network and the proverbial notches on my gun as much as my hard-earned and respectable MA in US History from an R-1.

As part of our internship, Natalie and I are researching historic buildings in Kansas City and writing brief architectural and historical summaries for each property. Finding information about historic structures has been challenging, especially for structures that have been repurposed several times. Churches proved to be particularly difficult to track down if the original congregations moved elsewhere. My hunt for these ephemeral histories led me to the Missouri Valley Special Collections.

The collections are accessible primary two ways: one, online via the digital galleries, and two, by visiting the Missouri Valley Room. There are some distinct advantages to the online sources. They are accessible from anywhere with an internet connection, and they available 24 hours a day. Even better, if the material is old enough to be in the public domain, then you can usually make digital copies for free. Nothing like downloading a series of books and carrying a library on your thumb drive!

But really, there’s something to be said about sitting down at a desk and leafing through tangible documents. That, and despite the wonders of Google, there’s an unbelievable amount of information that has not been digitized. So, if you really want to get into the historical nitty-gritty, you have to go to the sources. And if you are researching a Kansas City or regional history topic, you should do yourself a favor and check out the Missouri Valley Special Collections. The collection’s catalogue is available online, and they have shocking breadth and depth – check it out for yourself!

Located on the fifth floor of the Kansas City Public Library’s Central Branch, The Missouri Valley Room is a free, open to the public research and reading space. You do have to sign up for a researcher card and store any bags or backpacks in lockers, but the process is easy and the staff are helpful and welcoming. Some books and manuscript sources are readily available for perusal, but you will need to request the bulk of the materials at the desk. They’ll buzz back for the item and it will be brought out to you. I found the collection’s extensive vertical files most helpful for our internship. For those that haven’t used them, vertical files are collections of articles, pamphlets, and other documents pertaining to specific topics. The library curates the files, saving items of note to the collection. I had the hardest time finding information about the Sweeney Auto School Building, but the vertical file had all sorts of informative goodies. The contents can be a bit haphazard, but like gambling, the uncertainty is part of the adventure.

One of the great things about historical research is that it takes all sorts of wonderful places. Well, if you’re reading this blog, I assume that your definition of wonderful places at least somewhat overlaps with mine. Libraries, archives, and other knowledge repositories certainly occupy a spot near the top of my list, making the MIssouri Valley Room is a new favorite haunt for making history in Kansas City.

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WELCOME to UMKC HistoryMakers, the history department's Internship program. Here you can learn how UMKC's History Students are earning credit for making history, as well as how to enroll in the internship class and become a HistoryMaker yourself. To the left you can read the UMKC HistoryMaker blog where announcements are posted and current HistoryMakers write about their work. The navigation bar above provides the information and forms UMKC students need to apply to the HistoryMaker program and enroll in HISTORY392B and 5592B, the internship course.